There is often a need to remove a finished bale from the forming chamber of an extrusion-type square baler when discharging the bales in the normal manner as part of ongoing harvesting operations is not possible or desirable. For example, at the end of a day's operations, completed bales normally remain in the baler and must somehow be removed, even though no additional crop materials will be fed into the machine to force the completed bales out. Thus, it is desirable to provide a way of ejecting those bales even though no new material is being ingested.
Large or mid-size balers producing bales on the order of 900 to 2,000 pounds present particular problems. In those machines, unlike small square balers producing 60 to 100 pound bales, it is impossible for an operator to manually extract the big bales from the machine. Either mechanized handling equipment or a team of men must be used to carry out the task.
Additionally, "custom operators" who bale for hire and serve a number of different customers, need auxiliary ejectors. They frequently find it necessary to unload the last bales from one job at that customer's farm before moving on to the next job. But, it is always important that the operator not unload the leftover partial bale or "prime" in the chamber because extrusion balers are inherently difficult to restart when the chamber is completely empty.
These considerations are magnified where the crop being baled is a silage crop. Silage has an inherently high moisture content which increases the weight of the bale, makes it more difficult to handle, and complicates the ejection process due to increased frictional resistance between the moist bale and the size of the baling chamber.
Although a few bale ejectors are presently commercially available, none has the ability to allow the operator to choose between off-loading only the last bale in the machine or both the last and next-to-last bales in the baler.